Surprisingly, many of the lessons I've learned over the years have little to nothing to do with designing buildings. That doesn't mean they weren't worth learning.

Reflection

Monday, December 12, 2016

Gingerbread 2016

You
wouldn’t think it, but one of the most hectic times of the year in our architecture
firm is the annual Gingerbread display in December. Started before my time here in 1987, the ‘Display’
as it is known has grown from a simple gingerbread house display on a
countertop to an immersive, larger than life experience. The original objective was to create a fun
activity for our clients at our annual Holiday party held each year in the
first week of December. Every year we
say it is too big and should be simplified, and every year it gets just as big,
in one way or another.

A lot of people spent a lot of time on the display.

This
year, the idea was to do a simple streetscape in the city, 3 story townhouses
in an ‘L’ shape. Sounds good, right? Until the scale of the display doubles from
3/8” = 1’-0” to 3/4” where the size of a 6 foot tall person in the display grew
from just over 2 inches to 4 1/2”. For
someone who makes a lot of the people for the display, this was a big
deal. Normally we can reuse a lot of the
people from year to year. A Santa from
last year is just as good as a new Santa.
But not this year. All the people
to populate the display had to be made from scratch and twice as large.

The
simplicity of the theme this year was diluted by the idea to include some “Underground”
activities, even though these ideas were not really hashed out. During the initial meetings, all that was
discussed was a ‘Rat City”, which I thought was distinctly Un-Christmassy. So when it came to sign up for Display
entries, rather than doing a house I decided to work on the Underground, to make
it more festive than a subterranean city of mutant rats.

I
don’t know when exactly I got the idea, but I think I Googled something like “Santa
on the Subway” and I came up with this picture:

The concept photo (credit:BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS)

One
way to enliven the Underground was to fill it with dozens of Santas. To be clear, the intent was to have a subway
station stop with all the department store Santas getting off work and on their
way home to their own families. So I thought
that several of us could work on doing a subway station, since that fit well
with the Underground theme and as part of it, I could make a lot of the Santas
to fill the platform.

Along
with one other co-worker and my two kids, we embarked on creating a Subway
scene for the Display.